Saturday, October 11, 2014

Lots of interesting news and comment today

Update

The last week in Madison,
WI has been mostly beautiful,
sunny, cool autumn weather. But what comes next is on my mind. Between my heath
regimen, some family things, the blog and keeping Bubbles and Trixie happy down
at Hooters, I didn't get through all my email Saturday, but posting what I
have, as I'm out of pocket Sunday. (We'll see if my bride reads the blog!) Lots of interesting items today.

Working on three essays. Your help is solicited. Please add
to my examples of issues like Obamacare and Keystone, where the public is one
way and the so-called "Democrats" are opposed to what the public wants. Also,
send me areas where the Obama Administration has hidden or covered up the
truth, such as not releasing the premium rates people are signing up for under
Obamacare until after the 2014 election or destroying the IRS emails. Send to tartanmarine(at)gmail.com. I have
several of both, but I'm sure I've missed some. ~Bob

General News and Comment

Lots of House Democrats voted for it. Reid killed it. Message really is, "Harry Reid to Veterans: union votes are more important than your lives." If you can vote for a Republican running for the Senate, do so. It's the only way to remove Reid. ~Bob

Must See - Funny, But Scary: This Hilarious John
Oliver Video Explains How Police Can Legally Seize Your Property

Excerpt: As the author of this blog post, I place it into
the public domain. Anyone may freely copy it in any part or in its entirely,
without asking my permission, and without paying any money. I do ask you please
cite a link to http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/obama-252/
I ask you to please show this list to as many people as possible – and
especially, to please show it to as many Obama supporters as possible. Sunshine
really is the best disinfectant. I can’t stop Obama from doing any of these
horrible things, but I can tell people about what he is doing. So please share
this list with others on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thank you. The short link for
this is http://tinyurl.com/ku9vxug

Excerpt: Wisconsin voters
won’t need a photo ID to cast a ballot on Nov. 4 after the U.S.
Supreme Court issued a split decision Thursday night halting the requirement. The
6-3 decision came nearly a month after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated
the law, which had been on hold since a district judge ruled in April it was an
unconstitutional barrier to voting.

Excerpt: South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy
obliterated such lines of argument against voter ID laws, logical
step by logical step, in a House hearing in 2013. The compelling video from the
hearing is provided above.

Excerpt: Finally, it is official. On Tuesday, the
International Monetary Fund announced China
has surpassed the United
States as the world’s largest economy. The U.S. has held the distinction since 1873, when
it overtook Great Britain.
Given growth trajectories of the last few decades, this should come as no
surprise. Neither is it necessarily anything for Americans to worry about. It
depends on how the U.S.
manages the situation. (Another entry in the Obama Legacy book. ~Bob)

Excerpt: All presidents disappoint. It comes with the job,
the unreasonable expectations Americans have for their presidents, and the
inherent conflict and disconnect between campaigning (promising people all they
can have) and governing (explaining to people why they won’t get it). So Barack
Obama isn’t the first president to fail to meet expectations — and he won’t be
the last. But he has come to embody something else, too: the risks and travails
of reaching for greatness in the presidency without the crisis, character and
capacity necessary to achieve it. ... Aaron
David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the WoodrowWilsonInternationalCenter
for Scholars and a former adviser to several secretaries of state. He is the
author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t
Want) Another Great President”(Palgrave MacMillan), from which this essay
is adapted.

Excerpt: Thanks to a loophole created by the Illinois legislature,
retired teacher union leaders are getting pension credit for the years they did
union work after leaving the classroom. The arrangement has put taxpayers on
the hook for millions of dollars in retirement benefits unrelated to teaching,
and further drained an already overburdened state pension fund. (Not a
loophole--vote buying for Democrats for years that has left Illinois in desperate fiscal shape. The
collapse is coming. ~Bob)

Brutal Video: Grimes Refuses to Say if She Voted For Obama
Four Times in 40 Seconds. By Guy Benson

Excerpt: Please enjoy this short video of Democrat
Alison Lundergan Grimes doggedly refusing to
say whether she voted for her party's standard-bearer two years ago during a
meeting with a Kentucky
newspaper's editorial board. As you watch, bear in mind that this woman
was an Obama
delegate at the 2012 Democratic National Convention:

Excerpt: Marine veteran Andrew Tahmooressi’s legal problems
might not end in Mexico.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill said recently that they expect Mexican authorities
will release Tahmooressi in the near future. But American legal experts now say
the former sergeant could face more charges once he returns to California for allegedly
traveling through the state with loaded weapons in his vehicle. (No surprise.
democrats have to prove that Obama was right not to help the guy. After all, he
didn't desert or betray his comrades, and he was clinging to a gun. ~Bob)

Here’s the T-Shirt
That Cable Networks Decided Was “Too Offensive” to Show

Excerpt: The ad itself is here.
It's entitled 'Justice,' and begins with the line, "a tree fell on Greg Abbott."
Really. It goes on from there to basically attack Abbott for profiting
from getting paralyzed (!) before pivoting to a series
of non sequitur attacks. Team Abbott responds:

How the White House is like ‘dating the hottest woman or
man you’ve ever seen’ and more from the latest Clinton document dump. By Katie Zezima, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jose A.
DelReal

Excerpt: In an email, a White House staffer wrote that Keith
Olbermann, who was an MSNBC anchor at the time, wrote to the White House to
apologize for "whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this
ceaseless coverage (of the Lewinsky story) .... I'll be heading back to my
previous career in sports as quickly as possible ...."

‘Boys and Girls’ a
No-No at School Seeking to Be More ‘Gender Inclusive’

Excerpt: A middle school employee gave teachers
training documents advising them not to use “gendered expressions” by
calling students “boys and girls” or “ladies and gentlemen,” but to instead use
more generic expressions such as campers, readers, athletes or even purple
penguins to be more “gender inclusive.”

Excerpt: The phrase “Cartagena hooker” alone is a
mellifluous gift to ink-stained wretches everywhere, but the revelation that
the White House reassigned the alleged client of the aforementioned Andean call
girl to the State Department’s office of “Global Women’s Issues” is the sort of
flourish Tom Wolfe or Chris Buckley wouldn’t dare attempt as satire. ... On
April 23, 2012, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said there were “no
specific, credible allegations of misconduct by anyone on the White House
advance team or the White House staff.” ... But if the White House would
falsify records and lie to the public about this, is it really so hard to imagine
that it would deceive the public – and Congress – about larger issues like,
say, Benghazi?
(Just this week, former Obama Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News'
Bill O'Reilly that the infamous White House talking points on the attack were
essentially bogus.)

She makes $16 million per movie, sure, but that doesn’t mean
that she’s not worried about Obama getting equal pay legislation through
Congress. ... “It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he
needs to pass,” she told the crowd. (Anyone who wants ANY politician, left
or right, to have "all the power he needs," is a fascist. Stalin, Hitler
and Mao had all they power they needed. ~Bob)

Oregon’s first lady admits to secret past: A
green-card marriage to Ethiopian teen

Excerpt: A few years ago, Oregon’s
first lady, Cylvia Hayes, shared her rags-to-riches
journey — from her dilapidated childhood home in Washington
state, to a tent on government land in Oregon,
to the governor’s mansion, where she now lives with Gov. John Kitzhaber (D).
But she never mentioned the Ethiopian immigrant she married 17 years ago and
divorced in 2002. When stories seeped out this week that she helped him obtain U.S. residency
in exchange for $5,000, she said she needed the cash. “It was a marriage of
convenience,” she said in a statement. “He needed
help, and I needed financial support.” ... Although marriage fraud is a federal
felony, there’s a five-year statute of limitations, meaning Hayes
could not be charged as of 2002.

The Other Redskins:
Here’s A Map Of The 62 High Schools That Still Use That Nickname

Excerpt: One school that still uses the nickname is Red Mesa High in Arizona, located on a
Navajo reservation, and where 99.3 percent of its students are Native American.
Tommie Yazzie, superintendent of the school district that oversees RedMesaHigh School and a
full-blooded Navajo, said he is more concerned with the use of Native American
war chants and gestures during sporting events.

Excerpt: A small group of free-spending wildcard donors,
including investment tycoons Peter Ackerman and John Burbank, are rallying to
support Greg Orman’s independent Senate campaign in Kansas. Michael Bloomberg and a Jonathan
Soros-backed group are also considering entering the campaign on Orman’s
behalf, POLITICO has learned. It’s a dramatic twist for a candidate who staunchly opposes
big money in politics... (Funny how these big Democrat donors are backing an
"independent" who won't say who he will caucus with. At least
publicly. ~Bob

Excerpt: When the experts describe the Ebola disaster, they
do so with numbers. The statistics include not just the obvious ones such as
caseloads, deaths and the rate of infection, but also the ones that describe
the speed of the global response. Right now, the math still favors
the virus.

Global health officials are looking closely at the
“reproduction number,” which estimates how many people, on average, will catch
the virus from each person stricken with Ebola.

Excerpt: Last night, a protest turned violent 24 hours
after Vonderrit Deondre Myers was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer working a
neighborhood patrol while off-duty and in uniform. The veteran officer chased a
trio of individuals after than ran from him, and held his fire, even after
seeing what appeared to be a gun in the possession of one of the men. He only
returned fire after that man— Vonderrit Deondre Myers—spun around and fired three
shots, attempting to kill the officer. ... “It's a clear case of this young man
being gunned down by an insensitive white officer who was off-duty,” Akbar
Muhammad, part of a coalition seeking justice in the Brown shooting, told CNN
affiliate KTVI.

Excerpt: Protesters in St. Louis, angry at
a police officer’s return fatal gunfire on an 18-year-old black man, took to
burning the American flag in the streets, chanting “no justice, no peace,” The Blaze
reported.

Obamacare/Government Healthcare News

More than a dozen
states plan to cancel health care policies not in compliance with ObamaCare. By
Jim Angle

Excerpt: Is there any place you can go to find an objective,
understandable explanation of how ObamaCare works? That’s not easy. Mostly what
you find is completely one-sided. Either there will be an exposition about all
the benefits. Or there will be a litany of problems and harms. Is there any
such thing as an objective look at health reform? Yes. It’s my new book, Living
with ObamaCare: A Consumer’s Guide. By John C. Goodman. $8.96.

Excerpt: The goal of the Affordable Care Act (what many
people call ObamaCare) is to completely remake the nation s health care system.
It is the most revolutionary public policy reform since the War on Poverty in
the 1960s, with many laudable goals. But the methods are controversial. Further,
this reform occurred at a time when the nation s capital is more polarized
along partisan lines than at any time in recent history. As a result, no one is
telling you the whole truth. Every revolutionary change produces winners and
losers. There is some good and some bad. That s true of all change. But in this
partisan environment, you simply cannot get objective information about what
health reform means for you, at least not from anyone in Washington, D.C.
This book was written to fill a vacuum. You need an objective, unbiased look at
health reform, and this book will give you that perspective.

Excerpt: "The only people who don't want to disclose
the truth are people with something to hide." -Barack
Hussein Obama The government has released its new website which takes only
16 pages to enroll this year as opposed to the 76 pages last
year. However, customers who enroll in Obamacare will not be apprised of
the cost of their monthly premiums until after they have cast their vote for a
candidate in the states' midterm elections.

Excerpt: The feathered fireballs have been nicknamed
"streamers" by workers. ... The solar farms are proving to be
expensive, inefficient, land-intensive and devastating to local ecosystems.
Naturally, government wants to build more of them. There is a hefty tax break
that expires in 2016, and California
law requires that utilities get one-third of their power from renewable sources
by 2020.

In short, imagine the rise of the Islamic State over the
summer presented all of the same national-security and humanitarian
problems, but no political problems for Obama. Now ask yourself, would
Obama have done anything about it? Remember: The Islamic State took
Fallujah and Mosul
months ago and he kept calling it the “jayvee team.” As recently as August, he
was telling Tom Friedman that it was ridiculous to arm the Syrian rebels. In
September, he was wistfully complaining that the Islamic State made a mistake
in beheading those Americans because it aroused U.S. public opinion for war. In
other words, doing nothing about the Islamic State was Obama’s foreign
policy until the domestic political situation made his foreign policy
untenable. Chess Masters think many moves ahead, novices respond to whatever
their opponent’s latest move is. Total amateurs just move pieces based on
shouts from the crowd watching the game. Obama’s like a kid looking for
approval every time he touches a piece. And that’s why I have no confidence
that Obama will stick with his war on the Islamic State one minute longer than
the polls and political expediency require. (Worth Subscribing to. It's free.
~Bob)

Islamic State
fighters are threatening to overrun Iraq’s Anbar province

Excerpt: Islamic State militants are threatening to overrun
a key province in western Iraq
in what would be a major victory for the jihadists and an embarrassing setback
for the U.S.-led coalition targeting the group. A win for the Islamic State in
Anbar province would give the militants control of one of the country’s most
important dams and several large army installations, potentially adding to
their abundant stockpile of weapons.

Excerpt: One female fighter reportedly charged the advancing
ISIS jihadists, hurling grenades at them and
then blew herself up in their midst. Another reportedly shot herself rather
than be captured by ISIS when she ran out of
ammunition. Moussa's tweets from one of her Kurdish contacts from inside Kobane
conveyed the sense of betrayal the Kurds felt because of the lack of American
help. She tweeted: "Kurdish guy from#Kobane tells me: We hoped American
planes will help us. Instead American tanks in hands of ISIS
are killing us."

Excerpt: As the aerial campaign begins in earnest, many
observers are wondering what exactly its tactical and strategic objectives are,
and how they will be achieved. A number of issues immediately arise.

Worth Reading:
Analysis: Does the Islamic State Really Have 'Nothing to Do with Islam'?
By Jeffrey M. Bale

Excerpt: In all such cases, however, the perpetrators of
these violent actions not only proudly insist that their actions are inspired by the
Qur'an and the exemplary words and deeds of Muhammad himself (as recorded in
the canonical hadith collections), but explicitly cite and the
reported actions of their prophet to justify those actions. Therefore, to argue
that jihadist terrorists are not directly inspired and primarily motivated by
their interpretations of Islamic doctrines and by clear precedents from early
Islamic history, one must stubbornly ignore what the actual protagonists keep
telling the entire world. ... University

Excerpt: During the 1944 Warsaw uprising, Stalin ordered the advancing
Red Army to stop at the outskirts of the city while the Nazis, for 63 days,
annihilated the non-Communist Polish partisans. Only then did Stalin take Warsaw. No one can match
Stalin for merciless cynicism, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is offering a determined echo by ordering
Turkish tanks massed on the Syrian border, within sight of the besieged Syrian
town of Kobane,
to sit and do nothing.

Excerpt: Arabic media outlets are reporting the deaths of at least 63 individuals as the result of two
suicide attacks in Sana'a and eastern Hadramout province in Yemen today.
The attacks came only a few hours after the latest development in the country's ongoing political
crisis, when Prime Minister-designate Ahmad Awad bin Mubarak rejected his
nomination by Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi under heavy pressure from
the Houthi rebels.

Excerpt: Republicans greeted with fury a Wall
Street Journal report Friday that President Obama is considering
options to act in violation of the law by transferring the
remaining foreign combatants held at GuantanamoBay
to this country. The White House pleaded that it did
not know where the report is coming from but did not deny something
was in the works.

Excerpt: President Barack Obama is considering the use of
executive power to override a congressional ban on bringing GuantanamoBay detainees
to the United States,
which would allow him to achieve a long-desired goal of closing the detention
facility, according to senior White House officials. A senior
administration official told The Wall Street Journal that Obama is "unwavering
in his commitment" to closing the prison before he leaves office, and
wants to keep all options open on his campaign promise, which he considers part
of his presidential legacy.

Excerpt: ISIS might have a
new target: Twitter employees. After the site began cracking down on the
terrorists, suspending their Twitter accounts, its staff received a slew of
death threats from the Islamic fighters, the company's CEO Dick Costolo told Vanity Fair. Costolo did not detail the
contents of the messages, but said ISIS
fighters threatened to "assassinate" him and other Twitter employees.
(This is, of course, how the Islamic State deals with anyone who dares get in
their way. Theirs is a rule of total savagery and brutality. And the West’s
partial and inadequate response to it is not going to come close to making
Obama’s vow to destroy it a reality. --Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org.)

Excerpt: Sweden’s population is skyrocketing due to Muslim
immigration, and the consequences are extreme: in just a
single year — 2013 — illegal threats increased six percent, muggings
11 percent, burglaries 12 percent, and sexual assaults (not including the horrifying
rape stats) increased seven percent. Including the estimated amount of
unreported sexual crimes, Sweden
has 75,000 sexual crimes yearly. Some calculations suggest that the risk for a
Swedish woman to be raped during her lifetime is one
out of four

Excerpt: Lisa Nasim Basari, a 28-year-old Coptic Christian
girl living with a very few remaining family in Minya province, Egypt, recently
made a video descrying
the advances of a Muslim man who has been pressuring her to convert to Islam
and marry her. ... At that point, things took an ugly turn. Among other things,
he attacked and burned portions of the grocery store she worked in, tore her
clothes, and sexually abused her.

The boy from Kosovo
who grew up to be a suicide bomber. By Linda Pressly

Excerpt: In Kosovo it used to be the case that families were
culturally Muslim, but rarely devout believers. Recently though some young
people have become radicalised. Up to 200 are thought to be fighting in Syria and Iraq causing heartbreak for those
left behind. (Here yet again we see the direct connection: a secular Muslim
becomes devout and then turns to violent jihad. Does this mean that every
devout Muslim will become a violent jihadist? Of course not. But despite attempts to deny and obscure this, every violent jihadist
is a devout Muslim. Bland assurances that jihad terror doesn’t have anything to
do with Islam don’t do a thing to address or remedy this fact. --Robert
Spencer, JihadWatch.org.)

Excerpt: Jennette Hall's Facebook post said that JenisonHigh School gave an assignment to
10th graders to create a pamphlet that would be used to "introduce
Islam to 3rd graders." (The pamphlet is full of factual errors.
Islam, for example, means "submission," not "peace." ~Bob)

Excerpt: According to current and former U.S. officials
familiar with the proposal, President Barack Obama's national security advisors
swiftly rejected the offer. To free the prisoner, Aafia Siddiqui, who's linked
to al Qaeda and was convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill Americans in Afghanistan,
would violate the administration's policy of not granting concessions to
terrorist groups, the officials concluded. It would also put a potentially
dangerous fighter back on the street. (So, instead, they freed five terrorist
leaders. Probably because she was in prison in Texas,
and they knew Texas
wouldn't cooperate. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: Only twelve years ago, the Republic
of Turkey was correctly seen as a
stalwart NATO ally, the model of a pro-Western Muslim state, and a bridge
between Europe and the Middle East. A strong
military bond with the Pentagon undergirded broader economic and cultural ties
with Americans. For those of us who work on the Middle East, time in Istanbul, Ankara,
and other Turkish cities was a refreshing oasis from the turmoil of the region.
And then, starting with the still-astonishing election of 2002, the country
dramatically changed course.

Excerpt: Ansar al Sharia Libya,
the jihadist group notorious for its role in the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist
attack in Benghazi,
has released a 42-minute video highlighting its recent operations. The video,
titled "Enter Upon Them By The Gate," focuses on Ansar al Sharia's
opposition to General Khalifa Haftar's forces. Haftar is a former Libyan
general who has opposed the jihadists' advances in eastern Libya. In the
video, Ansar al Sharia's leaders again emphasize their goal of establishing
Islamic governance inside Benghazi.
And the production also features Wissam Bin Hamid, a jihadist leader US officials
once considered an ally in post-Muammar Qaddafi Libya.

Excerpt: A Mullah Imam of a mosque was blown up by own
explosives in southeastern Paktika province
of Afghanistan, local
officials said. The mother of the prayer leader who was accompanying him was
also killed following the explosion. (Kids--they blow up so fast these days.
Funny an Imam doesn't know john Kerry's "Real Islam." ~Bob)

Excerpt: He originally faced 25 charges of sexual
intercourse with a child after marrying the girl in a religious ceremony at her
62-year-old father’s HunterValley home in January. The
prosecution, however, withdrew the 25 charges yesterday and replaced them with
one count of persistent sexual abuse of a child. (It's their culture, and as
liberals say, all cultures are equally valid. he was just following the
"perfect example" of Mohammed (PBUH). From one of the strongest of
the Hadith: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was
six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years
old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari
7.62.88).~Bob.